Mark Zuckerberg’s Best Quotes

As the CEO of the world’s largest social networking website, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been quite social himself over the last eight years sitting for interviews, meeting world leaders, hosting the company’s annual developer conferences and (on more than one occasion) taking to Facebook’s official blog to apologize for various website updates that angered users. Below, a collection of some of the best Zuckerberg quotes.

“Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook.” [Charlie Rose, Nov. 7, 2011]

On Facebook Users

“The power here is that people have information they don’t want to share with everyone. If you give people very tight control over what information they are sharing or who they are sharing with they will actually share more. One example is that one third of our users share their cell phone number on the site.” [Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2007]

“I don’t want Facebook to be an American company. I don’t want it to be this company that just spreads American values all across the world. …For example, we have this notion of free speech that we really love and support at Facebook, and that’s one of the main things that we’re trying to push with openness. But different countries have their different standards around that. …My view on this is that you want to be really culturally sensitive and understand the way that people actually think.” [Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2011]

“So obviously, a big part of our mission is just connecting all these different people in the world. And one of the things that we are really proud of is that now 800 million people around the world are using Facebook every month and perhaps even crazier — it’s mind-blowing from my perspective. But more than half a billion people use Facebook every day. And I just think that’s crazy.” [Charlie Rose, Nov. 7, 2011]

On Facebook’s Definition of ‘Social’

“When we launched Newsfeed, someone made a group Students Against Newsfeed and people started joining it, and this trend was mounting. And every single person’s Newsfeed had a story that said ‘man, all these people are joining Students Against Newsfeed.’ A lot of companies probably would have altered the code to block that from propagating, and we probably could have but we have this focus on openness so we felt like, no, that’s not the right thing to do. It’s kind of like journalistic integrity.” [Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2007]

“Actually, I don’t have a TV but I do read newspapers. But how I read them is important. I don’t pick up a physical newspaper — I’ll get sent a link. The experience is very different, given to me by different people. What my friends sent to me or what other people think and send to me.” [Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2007]

“In the next iterations, you’re going to see real stories being produced. ‘These people went to this party and they did this the next day and then here’s the discussion that was taking place off of this article in The Wall Street Journal. And these two people went to this party and they broke up the next day.’ Whatever, you can start weaving together real events into stories. As these start to approach being stories, we turn into a massive publisher. Twenty to 30 snippets of information or stories a day, that’s like 300 million stories a day. It gets to a point where we are publishing more in a day than most other publications have in the history of their whole existence.” [Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2007]

“But the basic thing that we’ve found from building social apps and this platform ourselves is that almost any experience or app can be better if it’s social and it has your friends with you. And we just expect there to be really tremendous disruption over the next five years.” [TechCrunch Interview, Sept. 22, 2010]

“If the original Facebook was the first five minutes [of a conversation] and the stream was the next 15, what I want to show you today is the rest–the next few hours of a deep engaging conversation.” [Zuckerberg speaking at Facebook's 2011 f8 conference, CNN, Sept. 22, 2011]

“I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time…I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.” [ABC News, July 21, 2010]

On Business

“I mean, this is our commitment to users. And the people who use our service is that Facebook’s a free service. It’s free now. It will always be free. We make money through having advertisements and things like that.” [ABC News, July 21, 2010]

“People for years were asking me why aren’t we trying to make more money. I would say I’m trying to build a business for the long term and it was clearly the right strategy. I think the same is true now. Maybe there will come a time down the road when most of the industries we think should be social are already social and the primary thing we can do is optimize the amount of money we can make.” [Wall Street Journal, October 2011]